


a meaning of motion

by birdcelly



Category: Naruto
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, unreliable narrators
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-03-03
Updated: 2018-03-30
Packaged: 2019-03-26 06:18:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 10,888
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13851840
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/birdcelly/pseuds/birdcelly
Summary: Shisui just wants the record to state, in bold, that everything is Kakashi's fault.Or, the flash fic series where Shisui breaks his arm and somehow wins a genin team.





	1. bend

"I think," Shisui says, "that Madara's around."

Itachi turns toward him slowly. He's frowning, looking at Shisui with an absolutely dreadful face, and Shisui says, "How else can you explain all of this?"

Itachi breathes. Shisui knows he's counting to ten because it's ten, steady exhales before he says, "I think you need to see a medic. Several medics."

" _I'm_  fine. I'm perfectly fine." His arm's broken in three places and he was poisoned on top of it but, besides that, he's all good, he's got a sticker on his cheek from the nurse to prove it. "I don't think anyone else is fine and that's why I brought up my original theory – clearly, this is an illusion and Madara's the only one who could've done it,  _therefore_ —"

"Therefore, you're an idiot," Itachi mutters. He rubs his palms into his eyes. "Maybe you should…voice your…concerns to the Hokage…"

"You sound awful, by the way. Very hesitant."

"I'm talking to you, it's a default tone."

Shisui scratches at his cast. His nurse had given him a sticker, sure, but his actual medic hadn't been able to heal his arm to 100% and so – his current predicament.

"I don't want to do this. At all," he adds, like he hasn't spent the past few days finding Itachi to whine at him about this exactly; today's hiding place is the stretch of river bank by the compound's back end. "Like, I really, really, do not, my arm will be fine in a few weeks and I'm not old enough, I'm in the springtime of my youth—"

"You're twenty, you're not even a teenager anymore,  _I'm_  a teenager, this is harassment."

"The  _springtime of my youth_ ," Shisui stresses, poking Itachi's shoulder with his good hand. "If you were in my shoes I'd cheer you up!"

Itachi looks up balefully from his palms. "No," he says flatly. "You'd laugh and you'd show up everywhere to laugh more."

"Well that's—" Shisui thinks on that. "That's fair."

Itachi makes a noise somewhere between a groan and a curse. It's probably both.

"Just go," he says. "Just – go harass Gai. Do that. Commiserate about your lost youth together."

"Ah…" It's not that Shisui dislikes Gai – Shisui loves Gai! – it's more like Shisui doesn't want to get caught in another footrace when his arm's busted and he can't cheat his way to winning. "Maybe I'll just go talk to the Hokage," he says, and Itachi sighs.

"It won't be that bad," he offers. "Just fail them, that's what Kakashi does."

Shisui scrunches his nose at that – Kakashi, Kakashi he doesn't like for very good reasons – and says, "I don't want to be lumped in with that guy. And! And! How can you tell me to fail them, you saw who's on the team!"

Itachi tugs at a stalk of grass and shrugs. "All the more reason," he says.

"Your dad would murder me in my sleep – Kushina would  _murder me in my sleep_!"

Itachi just repeats, solemn, "All the more reason, then."

"I thought we were  _friends_. I taught you how to tie your shoes!"

"I don’t wear sneakers," Itachi says. Over Shisui's grumble of ' _well I still_ taught  _you_ ,' he goes on, "If you don't think they're ready, then just fail them. And if you think they are ready, then…"

Shisui crosses his legs. He pulls at his collar, then settles for sitting up relatively straight and looking out at the river. "It's just – it's such a big…commitment. Your team is your family. Generally," he says, nudging Itachi with his elbow. "As usual, you're the outlier."

Itachi frowns at him some more. "I talk to my team. I went to Tenma's wedding."

"And Aunt Mikoto had to drag you back to get you to change out of your uniform," Shisui says around a snicker.

Itachi's looking at him openly now, with those screening, considering eyes. He takes a second, and then, apparently finding something satisfactory, he says lightly, "Give them the test. And then take it from there."

It's still early spring, so there are a few lingering chunks of ice in the water. Shisui watches one bump up against a rock, then another, and by the third he rolls his head back and sighs. "Yeah," he says. "…Though I still think Kakashi should've gotten them, honestly—"

Itachi chucks grass at him.


	2. visitations

Naturally, Shisui passes them and then he takes them to the bridge overlooking training ground eight's creek. This is where his own team had met, and from what Obito's been yelling at him, it's easiest to just follow tradition with these things.

"Congrats," he tells them. He wants to sit on the railing the way he used to, but Naruto's already up there amusing himself by checking how far back he can safely lean, so Shisui stands with his arm still in its blocky cast and his other hand loose in his pocket. Sakura's huddled near Naruto, and Sasuke—

Sasuke is Itachi's little brother, and he's staring at Shisui.

"Moving forward," Shisui says, remembering back to the words said to him, "you guys'll complete missions together, train together, and eventually take the chuunin exams together." He thinks, at least; Shisui and all his year-mates had gotten promoted in war in random, desperate bursts. "You should have an idea of what areas to specialize in, but we'll have more of those conversations too. And that…should be it, for today. Questions?"

"Why'd you bring us out here if that's all you were going to say," Naruto says cheerfully. He yelps when Sakura thumps his knee, but he doesn't fall.

"Because we'll be meeting here from now on." Though honestly, he kind of agrees, he should've had this speech at the academy roof and he could be _home_ right now. Fucking Obito, he decides, and he adds, "But seriously, you grew up with Obito, I wanted to make sure you didn't use 'Oh, I got lost' as an excuse for when you're late."

"I'm never late!"

Sasuke looks away from Shisui long enough to stare at Naruto instead, and Shisui says, "Lying is also a bad habit to pick up from that guy."

"'S okay," Naruto says, hopping down, "I learned how to lie from Kakashi, he's better at it!"

"That's—" Fucking horrifying since Kakashi doesn't lie as much as he bullshits circles around people and then runs cackling away. "Good," Shisui says. "Great. Okay, yeah, I'm going to leave now, let's meet here tomorrow at seven."

He does the responsible thing of waiting until the three nod, and then he flees like he's in Mist's forests again.

He succeeds in getting away to mourn the loss of his youth and his free time and, generally, his contentedness. But he's like Itachi in that he likes to hide in obvious places and since Sasuke is Itachi's little brother he _knows_ that; it's barely an hour later that he finds Shisui by the river bank.

Sasuke hesitates – and then he sits a foot away from Shisui. He picks at the mud on the soles of his sandals, and once he's pried off one stubborn chunk, he looks at his nails abruptly and frowns. He's not as good as Itachi at waiting, but it's not like Shisui expects Sasuke to ever be as good as Itachi at anything. Everyone else does though, and that's reason twenty-seven why Shisui doesn't want this job in this lifetime or any other.

Instead of 'hello' or even some snide comment, Sasuke says, "You're always around here" in the same tone Mikoto says "Come over for dinner" after Shisui's run back to back A-ranks and the exhaustion's dug deep onto his face.

But Sasuke isn't his mother, so Shisui says, "It's my favorite place." It's not, his favorite place is the cliff above them, and Sasuke knows that too because he rolls his eyes. "What's up? Got an embarrassing question you couldn't ask back there?"

" _No_." He gnaws on his lip. "Yes?"

Shisui pokes his ankle. "Then talk."

Sasuke tolerates the poking with a grimace and says, "That was a stupid test."

"…Did you really come all this way just to be mean to me?" Shisui jabs him a little harder. "I get to decide when you're up for promotion, you know."

Sasuke ignores him. "We didn't _do_ anything."

"Sure you did," Shisui says breezily. "You guys talked to each other about what you like, what you don't like, who you want to be in the future… I found it all very enlightening."

"Naruto said he wants to be a dog walker."

"It's highly in demand, I applaud him on his choice."

Sasuke opens his mouth; then he closes it, swallows, and exhales. He looks upward. "I don't understand."

"Well, no," Shisui agrees. "You're more of a cat person."

" _Shisui_ —"

"It wasn't nepotism, or favoritism, or whatever ism you're worrying about. I mean, yeah, I'd have a lot of shit to deal with if I failed you guys, but—" He shrugs. His arm hurts. Shisui thinks his whole body just decided that now's a good time to take on the aches from that last mission, and he rubs irritability at his eyes. "I've read your academy reports, there's no doubt about your potential. Today was – I just wanted to know," he says, "and I heard nothing that made me think you were unfit. Any of you."

Shisui watches Sasuke; the kid's jaw clenches, and when he realizes that, he stills and stares at the water. Shisui's not sure who he picked that up from: Shisui or Itachi. The self-awareness from Itachi, he decides; the somewhat bizarre habit of staring at bodies of water when in distress probably from him.

"Brother said that you never wanted a team." Sasuke doesn't look at him, and he doesn't say anything else.

Shisui picks at his cast. "He's not wrong. I didn't volunteer for this." Speaking of, he's going to _strangle_ that asshole Kakashi. For now, though – for now, Shisui sighs and reaches over to put his hand on Sasuke's hair.

"I believe," he says, slowly and clearly, "that you earned this." He taps Sasuke's headband with his thumb. "What, you think I'd just roll over and pass you if your dad told me to?"

Sasuke glances at him. Shisui's casting a shadow on his face, and he looks five again.

"…Yeah," he says, and he bites his cheek to hide his grin when Shisui yanks at his hair.

"You used to look up to me," Shisui says sadly, dragging him under his good arm. He talks over Sasuke's squawk, says, "I remember changing your diapers, I remember when you used to follow me and Itachi around—"

"I still do that," Sasuke wheezes, and Shisui yanks his hair again.

"We know," he says, "and you know we know, and that’s okay, we'll just work on your stealth skills."

Sasuke stops fidgeting. He twists around to look at Shisui, and then, quickly, he looks at the ground. He says, "Sure," and Shisui – falters.

He can think of four times, at least, where he'd waited for Itachi outside his house, waited while Sasuke came running through the doorway with his plastic shuriken, and then watched as Itachi tapped his forehead and said, _Maybe next time_. Itachi had always been good at turning away and not looking back, but Shisui hadn't been, he's still not: he knows the stiff line of Sasuke's shoulders, the wobble behind his voice as he yelled goodbye.

They haven't changed, either things, and Shisui thinks he might have to strangle Itachi and then himself too. But, fuck, Itachi's been off the active roster for the last three years and Shisui had figured that this had resolved itself, that Itachi's general easiness over Sasuke meant that things were okay now.

Except: Shisui doesn't remember the last time he spoke to Sasuke alone for more than a few minutes. To him, Sasuke has always existed in Itachi's peripheral, a tagalong relationship.

And besides – he'd just said it, right? _I still do that_.

Reason twenty-seven, Shisui thinks grimly. But he hadn't lied earlier: nothing about them is unfit so he counts to five, and then he jostles Sasuke around.

"We'll work on it," he says firmly. "You all need to, and someone needs to get Naruto to stop wearing so much orange, and Sakura too with all that red…"

"— _you're rattling my brain_ —" But there's a dimple in Sasuke's cheek. It's not directed at Shisui, and that's fine; Shisui takes the laughs he gets when he starts lamenting about how it's actually not a good thing that Naruto wants to be a dog walker because while Kushina probably loves that, _Jiraiya_ is going to have a lot to say and, somehow, Shisui will get all the blame.

"Though I wonder," Shisui says later as they brush the dirt off their pants, "if the other two are thinking the same thing? That I passed you all because I was told to?"

"…It was a _stupid_ test."

Shisui scratches his chin. "I got a kick out of it, though. Sakura's dream was very interesting," he says, and he laughs as Sasuke glares.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the entire premise for this fic is that one episode in the tsukuyomi arc where sasuke's all 'thanks for the past three years, man,' and dramatically exits. i get that it was a narrative choice to not have any heart-to-hearts buuuuut :(


	3. point

"So about yesterday," Shisui says, "you guys know that that was an actual test, right? And you passed? No coercion whatsoever."

Naruto fidgets with the scroll in his hands; he rolls it over, tapping his fingers to its plastic ends.

"It was a _dumb_ test," he says eventually. Beside him, Sakura chews on her cheek and nods slowly.

"Everyone keeps saying that," Shisui says mournfully. Obito had shown up at his apartment last night with his usual disregard for doors or windows, and he'd spent the next hour laughing at Shisui. "You should be happy! You passed!"

Sakura winds a bit of grass around her fingers. She talks to it as she says, "You didn't seem very happy yesterday, though."

Everyone keeps saying that to Shisui, too. _You should be happier, the Hokage obviously trusts you enough to give you his son_.

"It's just my face," Shisui says to her, waving a hand. "It's a curse, really. Us Uchiha have great profiles but it means we have awful resting—" She looks at him, finally. She's frowning. "—Resting faces. We don't photograph well."

"…Right," she says. She flicks the grass away and smooths her dress over her knees. She looks, briefly, at her left where Sasuke's practicing his water-walking on the creek, and then she turns back to Shisui.

He doesn't think something as stupid as _She looks like Mikoto_ , because she doesn't. She's just making the same face Naoya did whenever Shisui said something wrong, whenever Shisui breathed too loud, whenever Shisui did anything, really. Naoya had been such a _prissy_ kid.

"So we're good here," Shisui asks, and the two of them look at each other and shrug. "Cool, cool. So that guy—" he points in Sasuke's direction. "He's been trying to drown himself for about an hour now, so I more or less get where he's at… You two, though." Shisui leans back until the log post digs, almost uncomfortably, into his spine. "You know, your academy profiles were decent and all, but they really just boiled down to 'general idiot' and 'book smart.'"

Naruto grins, and Sakura winces.

"I," Naruto says grandly, "am going to be the greatest dog walker _ever_."

Shisui considers the scroll still loose in Naruto's hands. "Sure, but for now, practice walking over there."

Naruto sticks out his tongue, tucks the scroll safe in his pocket, and bounds off to splash beside Sasuke.

Sakura's back to studying the grass. Shisui wonders if he can body-flicker fast enough to rewind to yesterday and kick himself in the face. Give them a quick test, he'd thought, it'd save time. Instead, he has three apparently precocious genin with dubious amounts of self-confidence, and part of it is his own damn fault.

Blaming that asshole Kakashi is a familiar comfort to him, so he takes a second to do just that. Then he crosses his ankles and says, "Yesterday you said your dream is to be strong. Elaborate, please."

She straightens up and recites neatly, "I want to be strong so I can perform my duty for my village, and…" She looks, again, at the creek.

"And?"

Sakura flushes a little. "Nothing."

"…Okay, then." Shisui slips his tanto off his back and tosses it at her; she starts, and it fumbles badly off her fingers to land on the grass. "In my experience, it's always good to be proficient at a weapon. For most people that means kunai and shuriken, but… you said you wanted to be strong, right? So we'll work on all three – kunai, shuriken, and that. 'Course, if at any point you decide you have a favorite, or if there's something else you want to do instead – I'll probably still make you learn, but we'll fit in whatever else too."

She picks the tanto up gingerly by the wrong end. She checks if her fingers can wrap around the entire blade, and when they do, she glances at him, wide-eyed.

It's the first time, he thinks wryly, she's looked at him and paid attention.

She says, "Um"; it comes out high and squeaky, and she ducks her head, her cheeks red. She clears her throat, too softly, and when she tries again her voice is still patchy. "I wasn't very good at those lessons…"

"'S fine. That's why we're here, right?" He yawns, and she busies herself with tucking her hair behind her ear with one hand; she's pinching the tanto with the other, her fingertips white. "Your profile said you were proficient at genjutsu, though."

"Oh, that's… We just learned theory."

"Theory's good," Shisui says, shifting around. He hadn't thought it would be this – awkward, without his tanto. He feels like he's leaning too far on his right side now. "You've heard about yin and yang chakra?" Sakura pauses, frowns, and shakes her head. "Nature transformations?"

"Kind of," she says, and Shisui nods, his hand coming up absently to rub his eyes.

He's skulked around the coffee machine at Jounin HQ enough times to have overheard the long complaints about the academy and its garbage curriculum. He's honestly always thought it was just Ebisu complaining for the sake of complaining, but then again… Shisui hasn't worked with genin outside of tipping them for mangled messages and that one time with Itachi some ten years ago. As for his own academy classes – he doesn't think he even really _had_ lessons, just vague instructions on how to perform body retrievals.

And it's probably likely, from what Iruka told him, that she's the type to excel in exactly what's put in front of her: full marks in coloring inside the lines, but not all that eager to consider what's outside of them.

"Well…" He'll rope Itachi into doing guest lectures. Or, actually – Rin, he'll get Rin. And maybe Izumi, too. And now that he thinks about it, he might need Gai in general… and Kurenai, and— "Let's hold off on that, I guess."

Sakura bites her lip. "Sensei—"  

That, he decides, doesn't sound right _at all_. "Yeah?"

She holds up the tanto, this time by its hilt. "Do you want this back?"

He's had that thing since he made jounin. It's not a present from anyone, or a memento; it's just hung on through the long days and one particular summer full of heavy rain.

"Nah," he says. "Got another one just like it."

She smiles at him then. It's entirely too hesitant and wary, and he jerks his elbow at the pair fooling around on the water. "We'll start on the basics in the afternoon. Go ahead and join them, and…" He listens to Naruto's whooping and, after a second's pause, Sasuke's cussing. He's getting _creative_ , that kid.

He thinks about it, and then he leads Sakura to the creek's edge and claps his hands.

"New plan," he announces. "Fifty sprints, from the bridge to that bend over there." He points about a hundred yards away and grins when Naruto does a double-take. "I'm thinking we'll do dry land running daily for conditioning, but since we're all already here…"

"I've been here for _hours_ ," Sasuke tells him. He's valiantly still standing, though his ankles are submerged.

"Seventy minutes," Shisui dismisses. "It's just a warm up! When I was your age, I was running _miles_ on the water."

"When you were our age," Sasuke says flatly, "you were a jounin."

" _Miles_ ," Shisui says. "On the water." He looks pointedly at Sasuke's feet. " _Miles_."

"He's part fish," Sasuke mutters to Naruto. "It's a byproduct of his name—"

"And it's one hundred sprints for Sasuke!" Shisui turns from Naruto to Sakura, and back. "Anyone want to join him? No? Nice, awesome, I'll be over there—" He gestures back at the log post. "If you're drowning, help each other out. If all of you start drowning at the same time, well, I'm sure someone in green will come save you."

He laughs outright when Sakura glares at him. Whatever goodwill he might've earned withers there, but – she runs with the tanto in hand and that, he supposes, is a start.

* * *

Unfortunately, he hadn't thought to ask if she'd ever actually practiced water-walking because she makes all of one purposeful step forward before she shrieks and plunges down.

"Maybe," Shisui muses as Naruto hauls her onto the grass, "we should stop calling it a creek if it's this deep…"


	4. the case study of uzumaki naruto

Naruto's in a damp, unapologetic village crammed along the seashore when he comes to a certain realization.

He's nine and not all that interested in the people with the faded red hair and their strained, unfamiliar voices that say words in ways he can't understand. He's a little curious about his mom and how she doesn't look at him when she talks to him; instead, she looks at the sea, at the line of the houses and their smudged roofs, the dirt path cutting from the water into the village in a single crooked arc. She takes her time looking, and she takes her time talking, and when it comes to the people, she takes her time listening. She leans forward in their creaky chair, her hair coming over her shoulder and blooming toward her knees. Naruto, sitting on the floor, sees how her hands clench, how her fingers stretch forward in the wet air.

It's a weird thing, all of that. At home, his mom is his mom: loud and spacious, sure in her movements, easy in her love. Here, in this place a few days' travel away, she lingers at potholes, bumps into benches. Her breaths are long and measured, like the oxygen here is under ration.

Naruto's drawing figures in the dirt when one of the old men says something, quietly, and his mom starts to cry.

Naruto flinches, and in the next second she's grabbed him and rushed out to the shack where they've slept at. She tosses their clothes into her pack, tells him to gather his two toys, and wipes under her eyes. Her cheeks are spotted red and she sniffs, scrubs at her nose. She waits until his plush dinosaur is in its spot in her pack's side pocket, and then she settles him on her back.

"Let's go home," she says, and Naruto, confused and worried, nods and closes his eyes.

His realization is simple: he doesn't like that man. He doesn't like this village. He doesn't want to come back to a place like this, weighed down by the sea breeze, rooted to its people's grim faces; confident and comforted by its own insignificance.

 

* * *

 

Kakashi tells him that for a kid who can get so loud, he spends a lot of time thinking.

"Thinking loudly, I'm guessing." Kakashi likes to poke his cheek, amuses himself by leaning just out of the way when Naruto swipes at him. "But, you know – thinking. You think so much. You didn't used to."

"Mhgnn," Naruto offers, kicking in his general direction. Kakashi laughs, and the sound fizzles between them.

"You have so much time," Kakashi says, and he pats Naruto's head. "Whatever you're thinking about, you'll get your answer eventually."

"Mhhhnnnnn."

Sure, he's thinking. He's nine, he's never seen his mom cry until that day a few weeks ago. He doesn't tell anyone about it, he doesn't ask about it, and when they'd gotten back home, his mom had hugged him and went into her room with his dad and closed the door. He's not sure if that's where she goes to cry, if that's what she went to do then. He's just thinking about the place, about that man with the long, grayed out hair; about the way he and Naruto's mom and everyone else turned, magnetized, toward the sea.

"I want Shiba," he says. Kakashi wrinkles his nose, but he leans down to summon Naruto's favorite dog.

 

* * *

 

His mom called it a field trip. "You should learn geography," she said, pointing at the opposite coast to where they would be going, and Naruto's dad gently took her finger and set it on the right dot. She grinned, and she told Naruto, "Be like him, okay? But we'll go together, and we can make our own map!"

He's almost ten now, yawning at his homework, and he remembers, abruptly, that they never made that map. He swings his legs back and forth, and when his feet knock against the table legs, the table lamp shudders.

A scarred, bandaged man looks at him from where he's hunched over in a nearby aisle. He sounds like one of Naruto's snider teachers when he says, "That is library property."

The man doesn't have any books in hand, and since this is Naruto's favorite table he knows that the three closest aisles relate to cooking, camping, and D-rank genjutsu. D-rank genjutsu theory, at that, and he's heard from Rin that those books are garbage and never used.

"Sorry," Naruto says. He smooths over a crinkle in his notebook paper. "Do you like smores?"

"…Excuse me?"

"Guess not..." Naruto hauls his backpack onto the table and starts to fit all his junk back in: notebook, shoved into that pocket; his frog pens with the nibbled caps in the main pocket; and his orange lanyard into the little compartment on the backpack's side. "Sorry, mister," he says when he's done. He zips everything up and slings the bag over his back.

"My name is Shimura," the man says as Naruto pushes his chair into place with his foot. The man watches him do that, his lip curled at the mud on Naruto's shoes.

Naruto nods. "'K," he says. "Nice talking to you, mister."

"Hm," the man says. Naruto's already past him and his three known aisles when the man says, "If you're doing a history report, you should look into the Land of Whirlpools. I'm sure you would have an interesting take on it."

Naruto picks at his backpack strap with one hand and with the other, turns the doorknob on the door leading to the library's main exit. "Sure," he says, and he walks out.

 

* * *

 

"…but frog dicks," Kiba says. "You've never thought about it? Ever? Your dad has _giant frogs_."

"They're giant _toads_ , Kiba, what the _fuck_." That's Ino, and she crosses her arms, sneering at them. Fuck is her favorite word, has been since she learned how to say it in a pitch that doesn't carry. Like she wants to prove it, she adds, "I don't know why you're so fucking gross all the time, but it's unappreciated."

"Unappreciated," Ami repeats from the row behind them, and Ino twists around to sneer at her instead, and Kiba rolls his eyes and Naruto aligns his report's papers.

"What's up with you," Kiba asks, nudging him. "Look at that – you got the top score! You beat Sasuke _and_ Sakura."

"Mm…" Naruto's not looking at the number scrawled in red by his report title; he's looking at Iruka's comments, the phrases he's circled, the spots where his pen sat on the paper.

On the last page he'd written, _If you haven't already, I suggest talking to your mother about this for more information._

'If you haven't already,' because Naruto hasn't. He picked out his quotes and background context from the history section in the library, tossed them all into a scroll, and mixed and matched the pieces. It's a very generic paper, he knows; Iruka's just impressed because of the combination of Naruto actually making an attempt and using a topic of some seriousness. And, probably, at the underlying question Naruto had worked in.

He leans back in his chair. It doesn't creak, and he ignores the squabble behind him to look at the trees, their branches thinning with browning leaves. The scenery blurs after a minute, and he considers the sky instead, its thick swabs of white clouds.

Naruto sees one shape as Shiba, another as Bull, and spends the rest of the day finding Kakashi's dogs in the sky.

 

* * *

 

Around the broad descriptions of rising monuments shaped by the tide, around the talk of seals, of how heavy their culture had been that they'd sewn it into their clothing, into the color red, Naruto just asked one thing: why?

If it's his family's symbol on the back of every ninja in this village, if it's the memory of their deaths that the village lifts as a banner – why is it, then, that the fragments of his family, the fragments of his culture, live in little dots on the coastlines, too small for bold-print on maps, the people slumped like battered, hungry dogs lashing out at their own?

It's the easiest thing in the world to ask his parents but it's his dad's face on the cliffside, and Naruto feels like this is a question – a gaping, gnawing kind of sense of unease that picks at his throat – that he wants to learn on his own. To take apart, to define on his own, outside of this place with its fierce, selective pride.

 

* * *

 

"Shikamaru," Naruto says, and in the languid heat Shikamaru mumbles something back. The roof's terracotta tiles prick Naruto's palms. The market's quieter end lazes beneath them, and the clearest sound is the off-beat murmur of the older women with their well-greased carts, the careful clink as they gather coins and store them in worn boxes.

"Do you think they're from here," he asks, and Shikamaru slowly opens his eyes to look blearily at the women and their meager customers.

"They live here," Shikamaru says, and when Naruto huffs, he shrugs, just as slow. "I don't know if they were born here, geez…"

"You're no help," Naruto tells him. Shikamaru lifts his middle finger the tiniest bit.

"And you're weird," Shikamaru says. It sounds more like a sigh, and he stretches out, hand over hand, back concaved out, and then to normal. "Doesn't matter, right?"

Naruto rubs his eyes. The women blur, the flat brown of the tiles blur, and the sharpest color is the off-white of the carts, running thick in the street like a trail. After a minute it smooths out and all he sees is a group of people with small, creased smiles and practiced movements.

"I dunno," Naruto says. Shikamaru yawns. Shikamaru's family is written on parchment in his dad's study; Shikamaru's family lives in a clan compound, stitched to the heavy Nara forests. If Shikamaru wants more, all he has to do is dig there, in the space under his own bed.

When Naruto's in his room that night, he finds that scroll of notes from last year's history report. He unfurls it and reads his secondhand family legacy, summarized into a fistful of thin bullets.

He sits at his desk, one foot on the chair, a knee pressed between his chest and the desk edge. He uncaps a green pen and writes in the scroll's margins, _Whirlpool dialect_. Then he tosses the pen back in its cup; rolls the scroll, uses a piece of tape to seal it; and sleeps with it in his nightstand drawer.

 

* * *

 

The day after graduation, he meets his jounin instructor on the academy roof. He's one of Sasuke's cousins, one of Obito's cousins: the guy with the curly hair and wide mouth and laugh lines sprinkled like fine scars. He wants them to talk about themselves: their likes, their dislikes, their dreams. Well – no, Naruto thinks, not their dreams; Shisui said, _Tell me who or what you want to be moving forward._

Sakura goes first, then Sasuke, and then it's Naruto who suddenly feels the cold of the concrete underneath him, the lack of warmth from the high sun.

"I like – dogs," he says. "Shiba is my favorite dog, he's a shepherd-mix or something… Um…" He hasn't articulated this to himself since that first time. "I don't like…unfair situations. And I don't like ports, I guess. Moving forward, I want to walk dogs." Beside him, Sasuke groans a little, and Naruto grins. "I want to be the best dog walker _ever_."

Their instructor, though, just smiles. He passes them, and he takes them to his old training ground.

 

* * *

 

"Fancy," Naruto says to Sakura on their third morning, just after their first run. She bites her cheek, and when she shrugs, his eyes are drawn again to the tanto on her back.

It suits her, he thinks. Maybe. It doesn't not suit her, and that's what he goes with when, after a few seconds of silence, she asks his opinion.

"'S not fair though," Naruto complains. He falls back on the grass, the stiffness of it readily pinpricking his clothes. He blinks against the sunlight. "You get that, Sasuke got a pep-talk – oh, I know it happened! You looked like someone finally took the stick out of your ass yesterday!"

Sasuke's trying to drown himself in the creek again, and he yells back, "Fuck you!"

Naruto snorts, and to his surprise, Sakura does too.

Then she jerks and, seeing that Sasuke's already turned his back on them, mumbles, "He kind of…missed that trend, you know? Ino started it a while back and it's just not that, um…"

"Creative anymore?"

"Yeah," she says, nodding. Then she does a double-take and jumps, a shriek halfway out as Shisui waves at them.

"Don't worry," he says, "Sasuke got plenty creative yesterday, I'm sure he's just out of ideas for now." Then he tells Sakura to join Sasuke on the water – carefully, though, carefully because no one wants a repeat of yesterday – and once she's wobbling on the surface, he faces Naruto.

"My bad," he says. "I would've gotten you a dog, but I figured since you already had Kakashi you might not need another one."

"Oh – _ohhh_ , haha, nice," Naruto says, snickering. "I'll always say yes to another dog, though."

"Good to know." He glances at Naruto's empty hands. "No scroll today?"

Naruto pats his left pocket. "'S here," he says. "Sometimes it's in the back pocket."

"Is that so…" Shisui looks at the sky, and then quickly away, blinking against the glare. "You fishing for anything special up there?"

Naruto thinks about it. He listens to the splashes from the creek, and Sasuke's occasional ' _Oh for fuck's sake._ '

"It's nice to look at," he says honestly.

"True enough," Shisui agrees, and he holds a hand out. Naruto pats his pocket again, then takes the hand. The sudden change in position leaves him light-headed and he barely hears it when Shisui tells him to get back to the water-walking. He goes, though, and on the creek he looks at his reflection and past it at the reflection of the sky, the blue-on-blue.

"…Hey," Sasuke says, sounding offended. "How the hell are you doing that?"

"Huh? Oh," Naruto says, considering his dry feet. "I was just messing with you the other day, I learned this a while back." He hops around a bit, laughing at Sasuke's face. "Sorry, sorry, it's just, uh…genetics?" From what he knows about nature transformations, it basically is.

Sasuke mutters, and Sakura looks annoyed.

"It's like glue," he says, and Sakura just looks _more_ annoyed. Naruto shrugs. He taps the water with his heel and the reflection ripples out, away.

The other nuances of being a ninja, of being his parents' child in this village, usually go over his head and he just retains the small jabs that stick out like thorns in his memory. But this, at least, comes easy: the ebbing motion under him, the vibe of it slugging around his feet, and the pulse of his heartbeat and chakra sliding together.

 

* * *

 

Shisui motions for him to wait, so Naruto waves goodbye to Sasuke (who looks a little constipated) and Sakura (who looks tired but elated). The afternoon sun thrums down on him, and he unzips his jacket, rolls it up, and sets it over the back of his neck. It tans quicker than the rest of him, and he remembers summer nights fighting off his mom in the bath while she tried scrubbing off the burnt skin.

"So," he says as Shisui yawns, his jaw popping, "is it my turn now for the talk?"

"Um… Hopefully not," Shisui says. He scratches his cast, and Naruto wonders if it's polite to ask when it'll come off. "Wait, you don't mean that talk—"

"Ohhh – no, had that one." Naruto grins, and adds, "The old perv and Kakashi told me all about it."

Shisui, Naruto learns, can make the same constipated face as Sasuke.

"Well that's…great. Cool." He takes a moment. They're by the creek edge, on a patch of grass that hasn't fully grown out from last winter; it's dark and scraggly in thin snatches, and Naruto covers a section with his foot. A small stalk peeks out by his pinky toe. "I guess," Shisui says, "that this is a kind of talk. I'm probably sticking my head in where it's not wanted, but…"

He smiles. It's not the polite one he gave on the academy roof, or the laughing one Naruto's seen over the past few days; this one is the one he's heard Kakashi talk about: the mild, tired one that adds depth to his laugh lines and comes across as his most genuine.

"You're not as easy to read as the other two," Shisui says, "and for me, what that means is if you need something – I'll have a harder time knowing, unless you tell me. So I'm hoping that if you do, when you do, that's something you're comfortable with doing."

Naruto blinks. "Sure," he says, automatic. He vaguely wants to ask Shisui how he broke his arm, why it hasn't healed already, why no one's signed the cast, his general opinion on old men hanging out in unused library aisles. Instead: "Do you think we can do out-of-village missions soon?"

"…Soon," Shisui says, and Naruto refocuses on him. It's not the answer he'd thought he'd get. "Sasuke's having a hard time with water-walking because it's not natural to him, and he's always been pushed to do things that are. He needs some time to start working out of that habit, and Sakura needs to up her base conditioning – and her reflexes – and that'll take some more time. And you…"

"I want to walk dogs," Naruto says, and Shisui rolls his eyes.

"Sure, sure. You need to focus," Shisui tells him, and Naruto frowns because hadn't he just been doing that? "I mean… you have a good, broad vision, you notice things, but in the moment – you have to focus." He pauses again; Shisui doesn't talk like Kakashi, like Obito or Rin or his parents who all say things in neat, preowned phrases. Shisui talks like he's always considering his words, like he's cupping the weight of each one first. "You've done the leaf exercise?" Naruto nods, and Shisui says, "It's like that. You learned the flow of your chakra by focusing on the leaf. That one thing taught you about your chakra, more than focusing on your body as a whole would have."

He adds, "That won't always be the case, but generally – the small things you see, they'll come together and you get a different picture than the one on the surface."

Kakashi had something like this, once. _Take your time, you'll figure it out eventually._

"So I should…look at things from different viewpoints?" Naruto tries, and Shisui laughs.

"Exactly," he says, and Naruto feels – happy, pleased, that he understands. "Give it a few weeks, and we'll be out soon."

"Mm." Naruto rocks back on his heels; the grass under his toes sags. He says, "I want to see the ocean." It's an admission, and if Shisui recognizes that, he doesn't say anything. He just nods and reaches over to ruffle Naruto's hair.

It's to break the moment, the sudden heaviness of it.

"Then that's what we'll do," he says. "Get used to ports though, there'll be loads of them."

And that, Naruto thinks as he walks home, might be okay. He wants to see it – all of it, as much of it there is. He looks at the horizon, a bold, stretched blue struck through with gold. Ocean-blue, sea-blue. It looks the way he thinks his insides do: wide, with an unknown depth, and a need to flip and change shapes, colors. It's like nothing can be contained up there, like nothing's exactly the same from one second to the next.

But it's all still there, he knows: it's just in different places, the particles switching around with the wind's whimsy.

He wants to know how it compares to his mom's sea, to that thicket of water swelling off that dark, quiet village.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> a couple things because this got out of hand...  
> 1\. naruto's diaspora is a combination of mine / my friends' and this take on it is by no means meant to be a generalization of everyone's experience  
> 2\. added the 'unreliable narrators' tag because of a few scenes here, and some other ones upcoming :c  
> 


	5. fibers and grains

By the end of their first week, Shisui knows the following:

  * He dislikes Kakashi, and he hopes they never meet each other in hell.



"Leave," Shisui tells him. "Go. Get your things. Just _leave_."

"Don't feel like it," Kakashi says cheerfully. He waves at Sakura, who stonily stares back. He'd scared her off the tree she'd been walking on and Shisui had lost about three years off his life watching her shriek and tumble down. Shisui had grabbed her, sure, but she'd fallen some fifty feet first.

" _Leave_." And Shisui points at the bridge, and past it at the Hokage Tower, and past that at the vague spot of village where Kakashi lives. "Go…bother Obito."

Kakashi sighs. He sounds actually dejected, and Shisui's somewhat alarmed to see Sakura's face soften. "He's on a mission with Rin," he says. "One week. They left this morning."

"My heart breaks for you," Shisui deadpans. "You should go hang out with Gai then, I'm sure he misses you."

At that, Kakashi smiles brightly. "Nah, I saw him yesterday! He's having fun with his minions." He glances at Sakura, who's back to staring at him. "I'd say the same for you, but… this one's turning into a mini-you, it's kind of creepy."

She kind of is with the tanto, the general deer in headlights look, and a budding distrust of one-eyed men in masks, but—

"If you're not going to help," Shisui says, "then leave, seriously, I'll get Naruto to drag you to Kushina."

Kakashi doesn't believe him, but ten minutes later they're sitting by the log posts, Sakura looking up at them with big eyes and her hands in her lap, and Kakashi's lecturing about nature transformations. Ideally, Naruto and Sasuke would be here too but Shisui had sent them on a run about an hour ago and they're probably somewhere in the forests behind the Hokage Monument.

Probably, ideally. Shisui doesn't know, but he has crows in and around there. Besides, he'd rather leave them alone than leave Sakura with Kakashi, and he knows just about everyone else in the village and most others elsewhere would agree.

…Never-mind that just last week he'd wanted to do exactly that. Shisui's self-aware enough to know that he's a bleeding heart and he'd said as much to Itachi, and, well, in the end he's pretty much where he'd thought he'd be:

"—and so," Kakashi's saying in a voice that Shisui thinks is supposed to sound like the Hokage but really comes off as Obito with a hangover, "it's all about how you _feel_. Ask this dude, he can make people disappear by looking at them."

Sakura turns to him, still with those big eyes, and Shisui rolls his own.

"I can't," he says, and her shoulders droop. "He's not wrong about the rest though—"

"Thank you!"

"—he's just not explaining it in full." Shisui rubs his eyes; at this rate, he might just rub right through them and turn up at Fugaku's house laughing and saying 'well, whoops, sorry about the eyes, Uncle.' "Yin and yang chakra," he says, "are nature transformations, the way fire, wind, and the rest of them are. But while those draw on elements for their base, yin and yang draw on energy – spiritual and physical, respectively."

"Iruka would be _so proud_ of you," Kakashi says, and Shisui's about to give him the finger when he remembers Sakura. He'd bet money that she's said and done worse herself, but it's the principle of the thing, right?

"This guy," Shisui says, pointing his elbow at Kakashi, "is one of those weird ones who's decent at every type – elemental, yin and yang. That's not usually the case; the public is capable of yin and yang unless they have an underlying condition, and beyond that most people have one or two nature affinities that they're naturally inclined toward."

"Naturally," Kakashi adds, and this time Shisui does flick his middle finger at him.

Sakura ignores that; she's looking at the creek, frowning. She chews on her cheek, and then she looks at them.

"So…Naruto said he's good at water-walking because it's genetic," she says.

It's Kakashi who answers, saying, "Naruto's a special case."

Shisui's not all that surprised at how she glances at the ground then, quick and familiar. Neither is Kakashi because he's fast to tack on, "Naruto's been messing around in ponds since he could walk, the toads taught him." The second add-on to that is that the toads had, under the cover of a green sky and a blind prophet's guidance, taught him on Mount Myoboku but even Kakashi has enough tact to not say that aloud.

Sakura doesn't seem convinced, but she takes the explanation and nods. She's twisting her fingers together.

_Dubious amounts of self-confidence_ , he'd thought. It's more accurate to say that Sakura's built like she's made of flour: ready and willing to burst apart at the seams.

Though that, he thinks, isn't quite right either. More accurate would be calling her a somewhat snappy, condescending preteen…built like she's made of flour. He can't relate: no one had ever needed more than a handful of words to describe him as a genin ("Kinda weird but fast!"). He'd been like a wind-up toy – spun and spun then set on the ground to charge, thoughtlessly, ahead.

"…He stares into space a lot," Kakashi says, apologetic, to Sakura. "It's a byproduct of his youth— _ow_!"

"Moving on," Shisui says loudly, hand still outstretched to whack Kakashi's shoulder again, "we won't be working on elemental stuff yet—"

"You won't?"

"—we _won't_ , because it's generally agreed that getting a foundation in the basics is helpful in surviving." Shisui looks balefully at Kakashi's frown. "There's no point in knowing how to make mud walls if you can't cast a basic genjutsu to have the guy walk into it and knock himself out."

"Sure there is," Kakashi says. "You can have a mud wall, that's a point."

Shisui doesn't whack him; instead, he rubs his eyes. He really should just gift-wrap them to Fugaku, someday.

He asks, dry, "Are you done," and he hears Kakashi snort and say, "Yeah, yeah."

Kakashi also says in Sakura's direction: "If anyone tells you you're a genjutsu type and to stick to it, kick them in the balls and tell them Shisui said to."

To that, Shisui doesn't say anything. Sakura has that deer look again, and Shisui shrugs.

With control like hers – a kid who'd gotten the hang of water-walking in just under two days and wall-climbing a few hours after that – she can do whatever she wants. Reserves can be built over time and it's honestly better for her that she'll work her way up, gathering up her understanding of it, of her own body, along the way.

They're not at war, anymore. There's no pressure to fit into the box stamped out on your dog tags.

"You're probably an earth type though," Shisui says, and Kakashi perks up.

"You can tell?" he asks, peering closer at Shisui.

Shisui grimaces and leans away. "Kind of," he says. For Sakura's benefit he explains, "I was checking your guys' form on the water earlier – it's not as exact as the Byakugan, but…it's kind of like a…flow? People with earth affinities, their chakra is a lot more…solid. You're a mess," he says to Kakashi, who just sighs again.

"The side-effects of genius," he says. Then he straightens a bit. "So earth for pinkie here, water for Naruto, and fire for Itachi's brother?"

"Lightning, too. For Sasuke." And wind for Naruto, he thinks, but that one's a bit – in the air. Naruto's chakra pathway isn't like any other Shisui's seen; it's like a thin overlay of Kushina's but glaring just as bright, in smaller pockets. Shisui wouldn't have definitively known about Naruto's water affinity if the kid hadn't confirmed it offhand.

The side-effects of a demon and a child co-existing for nine months, or something.

"Itachi's fire and earth," Kakashi points out, mildly, and Shisui shrugs again. His grandfather _had_ had a lightning affinity – a strong one – but Shisui's the only one left of that line, and he himself doesn't have it.

He ends up saying, "It's not always genetic," because that's mostly true, and Kakashi leaves it there.

"So, earth," Kakashi says instead, clapping his hands at Sakura. She frowns; she's good at looking severe without trying, and Kakashi laughs. "I'll show you some stuff," he tells her, getting to his feet, "when he's decided that you have enough of the basics down."

When both Shisui and Sakura stare at him, his hands drop sadly to his sides. "You don't have to look so shocked, you know…"

Shisui just tells him to leave, and for once Kakashi listens. First, though, he says to Shisui, "We should talk later, but I don't want to"; then he waves goodbye to Sakura and disappears.

A few, quiet seconds pass, and then Sakura inches forward to contemplate the grass where Kakashi had sat. She finds a worm wriggling valiantly by where Kakashi's ankles had been, and she turns skeptically to Shisui.

"He's a character, huh," he says, and Sakura nods slowly.

He's expecting her to ask more about herself, but what she says is: "He was supposed to be our instructor."

Ah. Shit.

"Yep." It comes out flatter than he wanted. "He had, uh… extenuating circumstances."

She's making a sulky face – and she looks like _Itachi_ , that's the _same face_ Itachi makes every time Shisui shows up wailing at his window at three in the morning. But unlike Itachi, Sakura doesn't chuck a naginata or two at his head: she just frowns more and shrugs and tugs at her dress.

"My mom was happy," she says. She tugs a little harder. "That we got you."

He says, "Mm," because he doesn't care to ask about the unevenness of her tone. Shisui knows about his own reputation, here and abroad; that it's "better" than Kakashi's doesn't mean anything except that the village's tendency toward unblinking obliviousness hasn't changed.

He doubts that it will ever change and there are days that he just – wonders. On those days, he fidgets with the knot on his headband, with his clothes, unsure and discomforted by their metaphorical weight.

Shisui scratches his nose. "I hope your mom's okay with you coming home late all the time."

"Oh – she's fine." Sakura waves a hand. Then she tucks it under her knee, fingers curled into the bend of it. She bites her lip, deliberating something, and after a moment says, "She did say she's surprised we're not doing missions yet…"

"There's not much point, honestly. There's no value in you guys picking weeds for an afternoon when you could be training." And there isn't, because he'd double-checked their general monetary status the day he'd resigned himself to this: none of the three have a need for D-rank mission pay, and besides, Shisui's hoping to have them out on C-ranks by the month's end. Today's D-ranks are just…he doesn't want to say that they're a waste of time, but man, he doesn't think he could handle supervising one.

Plus, he'd told Naruto they'd be out soon. The kid wants to see the ocean and that, at least, is an easy promise to make. Shisui grew tall on Mist's borders, in the port cities lining Fire Country's eastern edge; he'll never say those places are home, but – he likes going back. Something about the familiarity that brims up, easy, when he breathes in ocean air.

"But speaking of missions…" He glances sidelong at her. "Anywhere in particular you want to go?"

She blinks. "Um…?"

"C-ranks are the best time to go sight-seeing," he explains, smiling. "If there's a spot you want to see, then it's easy enough to get a mission heading that way."

"Oh! Um—" She wriggles her hand out to twist her fingers together again. Her hair falls over her shoulder when she ducks her head to say, hesitantly, "I think – Waterfall. I've read that they're…unique."

"Ah… Definitely," he agrees. "They march to their own beat, those guys." Well, them and Rain, but Shisui _never ever_ wants to go to Rain. "Alright, cool! Keep your fingers crossed and you might never have to meet Tora."

She's confused, her brow wrinkling, and Shisui laughs. Then he stands, and once she's followed suit, he pulls out his spare tanto; it's dull and faded at the hilt, and he's going to have to go to ANBU HQ someday to get something like Sakura's.

For this, though, it works fine.

"So just like we talked about before," he tells her. "Keep it nice and steady, there's no reason to rush – just get the motions down…"

 

* * *

 

Naruto's pretty bummed to learn that Kakashi had been around and didn't wait up for him.

"I wanted to _see_ ," he moans. "Obito keeps saying that he, like, _bullies_ you and I wanted to _see_."

For the sake of it, Shisui tells him to run another lap on the village wall. Naruto goes, grumbling, and when Sasuke and Sakura laugh (or as much as Sasuke laughs) Shisui sends them off too.

"It's team-building," he calls out at their swearing, retreating backs. "Be happy! It's this or catching cats!"

They don't run any faster, but he thinks they might stand a little straighter.

Shisui then takes a minute to mourn the fact that while his reputation with adults in the village and abroad might be stellar, kids apparently see him as "that poor guy Kakashi keeps bothering."

The worst part: it's all true, and Shisui mutters, "Stupid Kakashi," like it's a prayer to ward off bad spirits and responsibility-shirking jerks.


	6. to you, in memory of

Minato categorizes people. Unfortunately, it's not anything as noteworthy as Shikaku's seventeen-odd characteristic types or as interesting as Chouza's ability to consider people by their preferred potato chip flavor. Minato just has a terrible tendency to stick to his initial impression, and as much as that initial impression – that gut feeling – is right, it's still just that: an impression, a feeling based on nothing particularly concrete.

His initial impression of Uchiha Shisui is that the boy is small, thin-cheeked, and that his high voice doesn't waver as he delivers his field report. He's telling Minato that the group on Grass's northern front is down to eleven men, of which four are jounin, five chuunin, and two genin, the latter including himself. They're burning bodies and shipping back mislabeled ash jars, when they can.

"It's hard," the boy says, straight-backed, "because we can't light fires, so they stay there for a while." He has brown blood thick on the backs of his fingers and on his knees. He's about seven years old and he says his words in a precise, grim clip that he learned from the grizzled men above him.

His delivery is perfect; it's just that he's about seven years old, and though he's not the youngest Minato's seen outside the village walls (that's Kakashi, confused, trying to fumble out of, then into his father's shadow), he's angular and skinny and his eyes are a deep, flinty red.

Minato tells him thank you; the boy nods, bows, and he's sent back to the northern front with a single message: _Bite down_.

Two weeks pass, and they voice a brittle truce across a chasm splitting Wind and Earth. Three of Grass's eleven men return home: one jounin, two chuunin. Shisui, Minato hears later, earned a wartime promotion and a clumsy moniker. The kid's alive, home long enough to give the dead genin's parents his ashes, and then boxed away to the brewing discontent in the east. His name grows, he grows, and like everything else Minato hears about it secondhand, in the reports that pass across his desk, now wide and weighed with expectations and history. Uchiha Shisui earns a second field promotion, to jounin; he's just turned eleven, and when he troops into Minato's office some months later, he's reedy, with blooming shoulders and a sallowness to his skin. Too much time in and around Mist, Minato thinks; Kushina would be the same, but Whirlpool had had beaches, the sun: Mist has nothing but its dark, hazy borders and its ever-lasting discontent.

"Sir," Shisui says, saluting; he'd been under one of Danzo's captains there, but the signs of that struggle to show.

"At ease," Minato says. He's afraid it comes across as clunky and inexperienced. Shisui nods, but he stands rigid. "I called you back," Minato says, "because I have a new assignment for you."

Minato's pulling kids – children, a handful of years older than his son, babbling and bright-eyed – away from the fronts. He's several generations late but the treaty ink is dry, now; he calls back the children, regardless of their rank or their power. The council rages, the village rages; Sarutobi murmurs his understanding but not his approval, and all Minato really wins is an agreement for some kind of rotation: a few months out in the field, and then at least a few weeks here, home. It's more than anything they'd had before.

It's just not _enough_. Tokiko, with her bottle-blonde hair and clumsy sealing, dies in Goa; Toshio in crumbling Hiezu; Reina on a nameless beach stretching from one gray port to another; and on, and on, until Minato's convinced that the only ones left from that graduating class are Umino Iruka and Uchiha Shisui.

He's right; he usually is, and he doesn't know what to make of this bit of knowledge, so he discards of it as best he can.

In the quiet of their room, he says, "It's not getting better." Kushina faces him; her hair pools around her collarbones, across the hollows of her cheeks. She won't have another baby, and they had that conversation laid out like this, too.

"Maybe it won't," she tells him. "Maybe it will. All we can do is keep trying."

He sleeps; the cold war continues until one bleak spring day, it snaps. The Mizukage is dead from within and the country devolves into civil unrest. Minato gathers these reports the same as all the others and reads them with a kind of bitter relief.

Their soldiers return with fog in their boots and in their mouths. They readjust to the high village walls, blinking at them like they're taking hold of their internal apertures and resetting them. Minato brings in his lieutenants, the seven of them, and doesn't flinch at the boy scratching his jaw, contemplating the prick of new stubble.

He's tall, now. Or maybe just taller, and he issues his report the same as he'd done then: precise, the consonants trimmed off like excess fat.

It's the memory of that day, underlaid with the first one, that Minato remembers when Kakashi says, "No. I'm not the best option," and tells Minato to find the Uchiha's wayward, precocious prodigy.

"Excuse me?" he asks, and Kakashi smiles.

"I'm not the best option," he repeats. "I appreciate the consideration, sensei, I really do." And because it's just the two of them in Minato's still office, he adds, "It wouldn't be fair to them."

It's not fair for an Uchiha to train an Uchiha, either – but Minato doesn't say that aloud. He looks at Kakashi, and Kakashi holds his ground.

Minato doesn't remember his own parents; he doesn’t know the measures used to define family, but in his head, it's the time spent, the moments shared, the motions learned. For instance: Minato took Kakashi by the hand and led him out of a rotting room; Minato held him through night terrors, through the dreams of rumbling caves; it's Kakashi to whom Minato had, at one point, willed everything he had. He'd thought that in that vein, Kakashi would lead Naruto forward, through the sharp bristles of adolescence.

_I wanted you_ , he thinks now, a little helplessly. He feels like someone's kicked the back of his knees. _I wanted to trust you with this_.

But Minato is Hokage, so in the next moment he's fixed his posture and he says, "You're sure?"

"A man has to do what's right," Kakashi says, half-solemn. He grins; it's a bit forced, the kind of face you make when someone else wins first. "I'll always be around for him, that won't change. But I'm not the best option here."

"And this isn't some scheme to get out of being a teacher…"

"Well… That's a plus." Kakashi studies the window behind Minato. "I'd do it," he says, talking more to the air. "For him, I would, you know I would. But— it's not just him, right?"

He stops there. With abrupt clarity, Minato fills in the silence: once upon a time, a jounin took his little protégé and two other academy graduates as a team. Naturally, the protégé excelled; the others floundered, and ricocheting off a war's dense proximity, they grew in awkward, desperate spurts. In time, and with tragedy, the team knit together, and the jounin instructor stepped back and up into his rising accolades.

Kakashi has never blamed him for his eye, for Obito's self-worth, for Rin losing her sanity and ownership of her body; he's aware and understanding of Minato's then-youth and his deepening fallibility. Kakashi just catalogues it all and slips it into moments like these to remind people like the Hokage that, quite simply, he's not theirs in whole.

"Right," Minato says. It's early afternoon in a day on the edge of spring: the sunlight peeking into the office is soft and hesitant, baking the brown and green shades into pastels. Minato reaches for the scroll with the team assignments and dismisses Kakashi with a wave. "I'll take your recommendation for your replacement into account," he says briskly. "He's a good kid, I don't disagree there."

Kakashi bows, and as he slips out the door he tells Minato, "He's considerate."

Minato glances up, sharp, but Kakashi's already left, the door clicking shut behind him.

'Considerate' doesn't fit into Minato's cutout of Uchiha Shisui. It occurs to him, in that moment, that he hasn't spoken to the kid outside of this room in years – not since that muggy day, crouched behind a makeshift tent. And it occurs to him that the kid is something of a man, now, from what he's heard; he's twenty years old, thereabouts, and here's Minato hearing secondhand things about him again and again sifting them back, convinced of his own aged snapshot.

He doesn't immediately erase Kakashi's name from the scroll: Minato takes his time, he takes days. He asks luring questions and gathers a fistful of phrases; he talks to Obito, Kushina, Mikoto, Iruka. This is about his son, and theirs, and a girl: he wants to be sure. That he didn't undergo this due diligence with Kakashi doesn't escape him, but Minato discards that thought, too.

In the end Minato has his assurances and rolled eyes and trailed off questions around _Well, why not Kakashi, why not Obito_. He has enough that when he delivers the final list of assignments to the academy, he's ready for the second glances. But eventually, it's taken from his hands with a quiet 'thank you' and on the walk back to the Tower, he stops at a wobbling ice cream stand, laughing, exchanging pleasantries and well-wishes with the handful of passerby.

He'd dug around for confidence, and he thinks he has it. That night, he sleeps easy and dreams uncomplicated dreams.

 

* * *

 

In ten years' time, Minato regrets: it brims in his mouth, against the dam of his teeth.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the timeline's hazy because i'll forget it myself later, but it's generally like this:
> 
>   * Team 7, age 3 / Shisui, age 11: treaty with Cloud signed (aligned with the canon date)
>   * Team 7, age 8 / Shisui, age 16: tensions with Mist ease (+1 year from the canon date, where Team 7 had been ~7 when Shisui "scared off" Mist)
>   * Team 7, age 12 / Shisui, age 20: academy graduations (aligned! if you ignore the dead guy)
> 

> 
> also!! a huge thank you to everyone who's engaged with this fic - i never thought this indulgent thing would get 100+ kudos. so, thank you! :)


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